Author Archives: Emily Holbrook

About Emily Holbrook

Emily Holbrook is a former editor of the Risk Management Monitor and Risk Management magazine. You can read more of her writing at EmilyHolbrook.com.
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Insurers’ Top Underwriting Priorities

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3-d puzzle hands

According to FirstBest Systems, faster turnaround and easy, efficient collaboration with agents is most important to insurers in regards to their underwriting operations. This is what was found when FirstBest and CGI, an IT and business service firm, surveyed 45 insurance professionals with IT responsibilities, representing large and mid-size carriers in the United States.

When asked to rank the aspects of the underwriting process that can be most influenced by technology, based on your company’s priorities, insurers cited the following:

  1. Improving collaboration and ease of doing business with agents – 36%
  2. Consistent application of underwriting guidelines and discipline – 28%
  3. Improving underwriting productivity and quality – 18%
  4. Efficiency of underwriting process and work flow – 13%
  5. Integration of third-party web services – 7%

When asked to rank the ways that improving underwriting operations can most benefit your company in boosting underwriting and collaboration, insurers cited the top benefits as:

  1. Faster processing and turnaround time – 31%
  2. Improve service levels with agents – 27%
  3. Market growth – 24%
  4. Increase book of business  – 14%
  5. Leverage senior underwriter knowledge – 4%

“FirstBest surveyed a highly qualified group of insurers, most of whom represent the leading carriers in their markets, and asked the group to name a few additional areas where their ‘IT operations’ planned to improve in 2010 and 2011,” says Meira Primes, VP of marketing, FirstBest. “Not surprisingly, the most common responses were consolidating or integrating (legacy) systems, improving remote quoting for agents and speeding time to market.

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Efficiency—of everything from business processes to overall system speed—was a prevalent theme as well.

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Antiquated or disparate systems continue to challenge and occupy mid-size and large carriers, however many are planning to leverage new, flexible technologies to improve processes, agent relationships and profitability.

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E-payment Co. Makes Millions Selling Customer Data

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Call me cynical, but your personal information is no longer safe . . . with any company.

Especially e-payment firm Octopus Holdings.
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The company has admitted to selling its customers’ personal information since January 2006 and making a pretty penny off it — a whopping HK$44 million ($5.7 million USD). The personal data of 1.97 million customers was sold to six different companies, including Cigna Worldwide Life Insurance.

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Octopus CEO Prudence Chan, who was speaking at a private hearing with the Hong Kong Privacy Commission, was quoted as saying the company has pledged not to provide personal data to other companies in future.

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Octopus had earlier denied it sold customer data, until it was called up by the Commission to testify at an official investigation of the company’s practices, noted a report by Apple Daily. Chan then retracted the denial.
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As one would expect, Chan is now facing pressure to resign for her mismanagement and deceiving statements.

Something good can actually come from this, however. Hong Kong’s Privacy Commissioner, Roderick Woo, proposed introducing a law to make it a criminal offense for companies to sell customers’ data. Let’s hope that proposal is taken seriously and that similar laws are proposed here in the U.

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S.

For your enjoyment (or to merely raise the level of mistrust you may feel towards businesses and/or individuals), here is a short list of instances when the shameful act of selling customer data has occurred:

Of course, these are just a few examples of stolen customer data. If there were a master list, it would be too large for this blog. Though the U.S. has enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Health Insurance Portability Act and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, there is no all-encompassing law regulating the acquisition, storage or use of personal data. Let’s hope that changes soon.

The Gulf is Not the Only Place Experiencing an Oil Spill: UPDATE

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[Updated with video]

With eyes and media attention still focused on the Gulf of Mexico and the largest oil spill in U.S. history, it’s no wonder little attention has been paid to, what some are calling, possibly the largest oil spill in the Midwest.

A 30-inch pipeline burst earlier this week and spilled some 800,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, which flows into the enormous Lake Michigan. The spill has reached 35 miles of the river and left animals and plants in and along the river coated with oil.

The owner of the pipeline, Enbridge Energy Partners, responded to the leak by placing 28,000 feet of boom and more than 300 clean-up workers at the site. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm criticized Enbridge officials, however, claiming there are too few workers on site for the size of the spill and that the oil had reached farther than previously known.

Other officials also questioned Enbridge’s response. Representative Mark Schauer, a Michigan Democrat, said he was angry that it took Enbridge several hours on Monday to report the leak after it was discovered. He said he feared that the leak may have started earlier on Sunday and that the amount of oil in the river could be much more than the company’s estimate.

The Environmental Protection Agency is involved and recently released a statement that the spill may have exceeded one million gallons. With Lake Michigan only 80 miles downstream from the spill, many are fearing the worst, including Gov. Granholm.

Granholm warned of a “tragedy of historic proportions” if the oil reaches Lake Michigan. “The last thing any of us want to see is a smaller version of what has happened in the Gulf,” Granholm said Wednesday. “From my perspective the response has been anemic.”

Enbridge’s President and CEO Patrick D. Daniel has taken responsibility for the spill, claiming, “This is our mess. We’re going to clean it up.” Hopefully that happens before the oil spreads to the Great Lakes.

Here’s a video of yet another oil disaster:

Data Breaches Breaking the Bank for Businesses

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Hope you enjoyed that headline alliteration.

But let’s talk cyber crime. In 2010 it’s rare to find someone who has never had their email account hacked (happened to me last month!) or their personal information stolen by cyber thieves. But that’s small time cyber crime compared to what’s happening to businesses around the globe.

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According to a new study by Ponemon Institute, an independent research establishment, organizations are getting hit by at least one successful attack per week. Sound like a lot to you? It is. But what’s even more distressing and hard to believe is that the annualized cost to their bottom lines from the attacks ranged from $1 million to $53 million per year.

Ponemon’s first annual “Cost of Cyber Crime” report studied 45 U.S. organizations hit data breaches. It found that the median cost to companies was $3.8 million per year for an attack. Certainly enough for some bottom line blues.

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“Information theft was still the highest consequence — the type of information [stolen] ranged from a data breach of people’s [information] to intellectual property and source code,” says Larry Ponemon, CEO of the Ponemon Institute. “We found that detection and discovery are the most expensive [elements].”

The report found that web-borne attacks, malicious code and malicious insiders are the most costly types of attacks, and social security numbers are the most commonly compromised form of data. According to Datalossdb.org, there have been 10 reported data breaches in the past 13 days alone. Let’s take a look at the largest reported breaches in history, courtesy of the aforementioned website:

data breach

According to the Ponemon study, the 45 organizations studied did not have the right tools or technologies in place to prevent such costly breaches (bad risk management to say the least). The leading types of attacks were malware (25%), SQL (24%) and stolen/abused credentials (16%).

Numerous tech companies, such as Cisco and Symantec, offer data loss prevention products and services.

Without data breach technology in place, a company is throwing away their hard-earned dollars.

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And millions of dollars at that, according to Ponemon.